An oil landscape painting by Scottish artist Peter Doig depicting one of the few bright spots along one of Toronto’s busiest commuter roads could sell at auction for as much as $16 million ($U.S.).

Country-Rock (wing-mirror) shows the rainbow decorating an underpass visible from the northbound lanes of the Don Valley Parkway just south of Lawrence Ave. It’s one of three in Doig’s Country-Rock series, each with the same rainbow in different iterations and different moods. They were painted between 1998 and 2000, inspired by his childhood years in Canada.

The piece up for auction June 30 shows the corner of a car’s side view mirror, a guardrail and some faint trees and houses.

British auction house Sotheby’s announced the painting’s entry into their summer sale via Instagram on Tuesday, calling the piece “one of the most important works by the artist ever to appear on the market . . . Country-rock (wing-mirror) belongs to a series of three works which together rank among the most celebrated and desirable in the artist’s oeuvre,” in a later written statement.

Countless Toronto commuters have been exposed to the rainbow tunnel since it was first painted on the underpass by Norwegian “guerrilla mural artist” B.C. “Berg” Johnson in 1972. It’s been restored and repainted at least 20 times since.

However, Doig’s depiction has become much more meaningful, at least to the commercial fine art world.

“The rainbow tunnel is one of the most prominent and resonant motifs in Doig’s oeuvre,” said Cheyenne Westphal, co-global head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s.

“Doig is a giant in the current market, and this particular work is fabled.”

For Torontonians, the mural is a familiar sight that taps into a sort of collective memory, Westphal told the Star.

“The way Peter has chosen to represent it is in a sort of rather dreamy, perfectly spring-summer, landscape mode,” she said.

The original painter Berg — whose intention was to brighten the otherwise grim commute and mundane scenery — broke his leg during the mural’s creation as a 16-year-old and was arrested several times when touching it up before being slapped with a trespassing order in 1994. He remained anonymous for years, identified only as “the Caretaker of Dreams.”

Doig has sold other paintings for similar prices: Road House (1991) sold in New York last month for $11.93 million (U.S.) and The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991) sold for $11.89 million (U.S.) in London in 2013.

White Canoe sold at auction for $11.3 million (U.S.) in 2007, breaking a sales record for a living European artist.

With files from Laurent Bastien Corbeil

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